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Now, Kathleen Wynne says there’s no backing down or backing off the activist plan that helped her come back as premier with a majority government bigger than she banked on.

In her first sit-down interview since returning to the premier’s office — voters extended her lease by another four years last Thursday — Wynne talked candidly about her stunning election mandate and the underlying message:

She owes no debts to either big business or big labour. And she stands by her promise to wipe out Ontario’s deficit within three years — there’s “no flexibility” — while bankrolling a massive $15-billion GTHA transit plan.

Anyone counting on post-election IOUs has miscalculated. That’s why she is sending a message of restraint to Bay Street and the major unions, while appealing to local mayors to line up behind a coherent and co-ordinated transit plan.

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Her message amounts to no mass layoffs, but no big payoffs either. She will push the envelope, but stay within the fiscal envelope. And break through political gridlock in search of a breakthrough on transportation gridlock.

“The message is that we have laid out a (fiscal) plan that we are determined to stick to,” Wynne stressed repeatedly.

Minutes before walking down the hall to greet newly elected Liberals MPPs waiting in the government caucus room, the premier promised to hold firm by finding a middle way. Not just because that’s where most Ontarians reside on the political spectrum, but because her financial margin for manoeuvring is so narrow.

“We’ve got a plan that lands us somewhere in the centre — I don’t know if it’s a new centre, but it’s certainly an active centre — where I think most people in Ontario want government to be,” she said.

That means movement on a publicly funded pension plan to supplement the outdated CPP, massive new transit investments to tackle gridlock, and more money for the working poor.

But the money will only go so far. Despite the support of major unions during the campaign, Wynne is insisting on continued wage restraint.

“We have no new money for wages and salaries and there’s no flexibility on that,” she said. “We don’t have a choice about whether we put billions of dollars more in to sweeten the pot, because we don’t have those billions.”

If people weren’t paying attention during the campaign to her core message, they had best heed it now: “Now’s the time to get to understand it, because the plan is the plan as we laid it out, and there isn’t new money.”

Instead, Wynne must strike a balance between promoting social justice and being fiscally judicious. Teachers’ unions negotiating ahead of a fall contract deadline may be disappointed, but can take consolation from the way she budgeted increases for child care and home-care workers at the bottom end ($12.50 an hour) who are “not paid enough to make their work stable.”

Wynne’s professed activism — and passion for pension reform — has been batted down by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has ruled out her appeals to enhance the Canada Pension Plan. The premier responded in her pre-election budget with an Ontario Retirement Pension Plan of her own to supplement (and mirror) the CPP, provoking — and stoking — a war of words with the PM.

There hasn’t been any personal word from Harper since the votes were counted: “He hasn’t called,” Wynne confided, feigning hurt. And no talks are planned.

But she is sending a message that there’s still time to rebuild a relationship between Queen’s Park and Ottawa — Canada’s two biggest governments — to benefit the country’s biggest economy and most populous province.

“I still believe that the right way to go would be for Stephen Harper to work with us to enhance the CPP,” she persisted.

Apart from pensions, there is also common ground on mining the Ring of Fire in the far north. Ontario is also laying the groundwork for transit investments, but with little sustained interest from Ottawa.

These are areas “where there’s a meeting of interests, if not a meeting of minds, completely.”

But when it comes to tapping Ontarians more for transit, Wynne now says they are tapped out. After talking up tolls and taxes during the Liberal leadership campaign, and downplaying them ever since, she detours around them.

Would she use the next four years to reopen the debate, by trying to persuade tax-averse Ontarians that road tolls might help pay — and pave — the way? Wynne won’t bite, insisting that her province-wide $29 billion in new transit investments doesn’t need tolls, regardless of the politics: “Our plan stands.”

Activism, it seems, only goes so far. But Wynne has come a long way since walking into the premier’s office 17 months ago on a borrowed mandate and borrowed time.

As the interview winds up, Wynne gets up, surveys the walls of her corner office, takes a deep breath. And takes stock. She’s relieved not to be moving out so soon after coming in — not just because of the evocative native art (on loan from the Archives of Ontario), or the snapshots of her grandchildren on display.

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